Soumaya Keynes
speaker
263 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 26 Jul
Soumaya Keynes’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I think it might be worth just being specific about why those first tariffs weren't quite as bad as everyone feared.
The answer is retaliation to a large extent.
The big concern was that other countries would hit back and that would drag the economy into a tit-for-tat spiral.
crashing confidence, massively raising uncertainty.
Those are the mechanisms behind the most dire warnings.
The retaliation just didn't happen.
China did retaliate.
China was the exception, but that
But it retaliated so effectively that actually it stopped the escalation.
The US essentially realized that the Chinese weapon of restricting rare earths exports was so powerful that it really couldn't raise tariffs higher and higher and higher.
And so the tariffs on China peaked and then they fell.
The other reason why the tariffs weren't as bad as many people feared is because actually there were so many exemptions applied that
If you look at the data, the applied tariff rates, the rates that were actually collected, if you just compare revenue and total imports, were much lower than those statutory tariff rates, which are the legal rates.
So that's some of why that didn't lead to the end of the world that time.
But I think more generally, my takeaway from reading all the research and going through this is...
is that tariffs, in the same way that trade liberalisation doesn't set your economy on fire, it doesn't provide that immediate growth boost, closing off to trade isn't going to crash the economy.
The effects
when they come are much slower.
We think that actually the biggest effects of trade come with this sense that actually you're trading ideas.
When you're closing off to trade, you're threatening innovation, productivity.
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